The present disclosure relates to screen printing and, in particular, to determining ink colors to be used in a screen printing process.
Screen printing is a printing process that utilizes a stencil supported by a mesh to reproduce an image on various substrates, such as t-shirts, posters, or other materials. The stencil includes openings that define the image and permit ink to flow through the mesh and onto the substrate. A squeegee or other blade device is used to push the ink through the mesh and onto the substrate.
Before printing the image, an algorithm is used to analyze the image and identify an appropriate combination of ink colors (e.g., up to 10 ink colors total) that can be used to print the image. Existing algorithms use histograms that consider the color of each pixel in the digital image. These histogram approaches are generally computationally intensive and slow, particularly given the large number of pixels that the digital image may contain. The histogram approaches also give insufficient consideration to the locations of the pixels in the image and to the colors of neighboring pixels. As a result, compression effects (e.g., due to file size reduction in JPEG images) and other artifacts (e.g., anti-aliasing in raster images) are not considered properly and can distort the ink color selection process. For example, a histogram approach may conclude that a separate gray ink color should be used to represent gray pixels that appear along black diagonal lines in an image, for anti-aliasing purposes (e.g., to make the edges of the lines look smoother on a computer monitor).
There is a need for improved systems and methods for identifying ink colors to be used in screen printing processes.